Leo Tolstoy said that, “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Well, actually he said it in Russian, but not speaking Russian or having a keyboard with the Cyrillic alphabet, this is the best I can do. On a similar note, my mother has a wooden sign that hangs on the side of the refrigerator that reads, “As far as anybody knows, we are a normal family.”
Of course, there’s no such thing as a normal family, as anyone who has relatives should be well aware of, and that’s what makes stories about dysfunctional families so appealing. I just read the memoir Sweet and Low: A Family Story by Rich Cohen which presents a history of his own not-so-normal family, who among other things are the folks who invented and made a fortune off of Sweet’N Low.
It’s a testament to Cohen’s writing and perhaps my own quirkiness that I found the history of artificial sweeteners so fascinating, but of course the real story here is the wackiness of this family and the business that they run. I loved the scene early in the book when the author’s older brother learned at an early age that the dice (or in this case the little scraps of paper) were stacked against him, and he was not the favorite grandchild.
Reading about the Eisenstadt clan reminded me very much of another family with a business of their own. I am talking about The Bluths, of course, subject of the now defunct television series Arrested Development. Not being much of a television watcher, I missed the series when it originally aired, but thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I have been working my way through the series on Hulu.com. The similarities are striking. There’s the FBI raid, the shady attorney and the cold-hearted matriarch. Arrested Development lacks an eccentric aunt living in a super-chilled room, but I think Buster makes a pretty good stand-in for Aunt Gladys.
Apparently, when short on inspiration, one need only turn to one’s own family for endlessly entertaining material. To avoid being disinherited as Cohen’s branch of the family was, you might want to change the names and some of the distinguishing characteristics of your family members. Cohen offers some tips for writing family memoirs in this Slate article.
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